Multi-table Full Text Search in Postgres

Easily searching across an application’s data is a pervasive need. If you are lucky, you can get away with simple sorting or searching on a single column, but it is more likely that you need full text search across multiple models, all from a single search <input>.

Thanks to the power of Postgres’ full text search, rolling your own search isn't too difficult.

Following an actual feature evolution which I worked on for a client, we will start with a search feature that queries a single column with LIKE and build up to finding results across multiple columns on multiple tables using database views, optimizing the query time with full text indices and representing the results as a polymorphic association on an ActiveRecord model in Rails.